As luck would have it, it all started with comic books, or, more to the point, ‘comix’. By the time I moved to California in ’69 I had conceived a great fascination with the Underground Comix, specifically with their idiosyncratic drawing styles, all in black and white, and utterly irreverent. I wanted to have one of my own out there in print, but my drawing skills were modest, at best. I began a new regimen: returning home from work, I’d flip on the TV (for noise), crack a cold beer, sit on the floor with my back to the couch with a drawing board on my lap, and start filling newsprint pads full of sketches of people and things. With time, these things began to sort themselves into storylines; the sketches became page layouts with speech balloons to be filled. ‘Took about six years, but at the end of it I could draw. ‘Connaught and Cornwall’ stems directly from the my first serious go at creating a full 32 page comic. It was called “H.M.S.Hotspur”.

“H.M.S.Hotspur” began when I was reading a bit of WWI history. It seems that when England’s King George V ascended the throne in 1910, he wanted the actual coronation to take place in India. (Seeing as he was King of England and Emperor of India) Parliament, however, didn’t think that would actually be legal, or, if it was, it was still definitely illegal to take the Crown Jewels out of England, and that finished that. It gave me a starting point. In my story, George V does go to India, and the Crown Jewels are transported on board a huge Zeppelin (Hotspur) which has been secretly built in northern Scotland. Sending the Crown Jewels by air makes for perfect security, and the unveiling of Hotspur at the Coronation Durbar ( an assembly of chieftains to swear fealty to a new ruler) would provide a fine show of British Imperial muscle as Hotspur dwarfs anything the Germans can put forward. On board, there is a cross section of Victorian society: lesser nobility, military, diplomats, European notables, and representatives from virtually every Crown Colony, especially India. Howsoever; not everyone on board is what they appear to be and there are those who have a strong interest in seeing that Hotspur does not arrive in India. It was this monstrously large Zeppelin that Mark Seymour decided we should build and thus gave rise to the Connaught and Cornwall Rigid Naval Airship Construction Co.